Saturday, February 3, 2018

US taxpayer funded FBI and Foreign Intelligence Court worked together for almost a year to influence 2016 US election and its aftermath, Oct. 2016-Oct. 2017. Incredibly, a Yahoo News article was used to obtain Court warrant. FBI knew Democrat campaign operative was source of Yahoo article: FBI cited Democrat operative Steele to corroborate Democrat operative Steele. FBI didn't mention in 3 spy court renewals that it was still working with Steele-Wall St. Journal Editorial Board, 2/2/18

The White House declassified the memo Friday, and you don’t
have to be a civil libertarian to be shocked by the details. The memo
confirms that the FBI and Justice Department on Oct. 21, 2016 obtained a
FISA order to surveil
Carter Page,
an American citizen who was a relatively minor volunteer adviser
to the
Trump
presidential campaign.

Unlike
a normal court, FISA doesn’t have competing pleaders. The FBI and
Justice appear ex parte as applicants, and thus the judges depend on
candor from both. Yet the FBI never informed the court that Mr. Steele
was in effect working for the Clinton campaign. The FBI retained Mr.
Steele as a source, and in October 2016 he talked to Mother Jones
magazine without authorization about the FBI investigation and his
dossier alleging collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. The
FBI then fired Mr. Steele, but it never told the FISA judges about that
either. Nor did it tell the court any of this as it sought three
subsequent renewals of the order on Mr. Page.

We don’t know the
political motives of the FBI and Justice officials, but the facts are
damaging enough. The FBI in essence let itself and the FISA court be
used to promote a major theme of the Clinton campaign.Mr. Steele and
Fusion then leaked the fact of the investigation to friendly reporters
to try to defeat
Mr. Trump
before the election. And afterward they continued to leak all
this to the press to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s
victory.

We also know the FBI wasn’t straight with Congress, as it hid most of these facts from investigators in a briefing on the
dossier in January 2017. The FBI did not tell Congressabout Mr.
Steele’s connection to the Clinton campaign, and the House had to issue
subpoenas for Fusion bank records to discover the truth.Nor did the FBI
tell investigators that it continued receiving information from Mr.
Steele and Fusion even after it had terminated him. The memo says the
bureau’s intermediary was Justice Department official
Bruce Ohr,
whose wife, incredibly, worked for Fusion
. Democrats are
howling that the memo, produced by Republican staff, is misleading and
leaves out essential details. They are producing their own summary of
the evidence, and by all means let’s see that too. President Trump
should declassify it promptly, along with Senator
Chuck Grassley’s
referral for criminal investigation of Mr. Steele. But note that
Democrats aren’t challenging the core facts that the FBI used the
dossier to gain a FISA order or the bureau’s lack of disclosure to the
FISA judges.

The details of Friday’s memo also rebut most of the
criticisms of its release. The details betray no intelligence sources
and methods. As to the claim that the release tarnishes the FBI and FISA
court, exposing abuses is the essence of accountability in a democracy.

Intelligence Chairman
Devin Nunes
is doing a service by forcing these facts into the public domain
where the American people can examine them, hold people accountable, and
then Congress can determine how to prevent them in the future. The U.S.
has weatheredinstitutional crises before—Iran-Contra, the 9/11
intelligence failure, even Senator
Dianne Feinstein’s
campaign against the CIA and enhanced interrogation.

The
other political misdirection is that the memo is designed to undermine
special counsel
Robert Mueller’s
probe into possible Trump collusion with Russia. We doubt
Mr. Mueller
will be deterred by any of this. The question of FISA abuse is
independent of Mr.
Mueller’s
work, and one that Congress takes up amid a larger debate about
surveillance and national security. Mr. Trump would do well to knock off
the tweets lambasting the Mueller probe, and let House and Senate
Republicans focus public attention on these FISA abuses.

Toward
that end, the public should see more of the documents that are behind
the competing intelligence memos to judge who is telling the truth. Mr.
Trump and the White House should consider the remedy of radical
transparency."